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neutrino38 (1037806) writes "ATOS Healthcare, subsidiary from the French service company ATOS has won a contract with UK govt in 2010. Atos Healthcare conducts assessments on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. Basically it implements David Cameron policy on social services fraud management.

It became so impopular that its employees are routinely insulted and threathened on social networks (about 153 threats a month according to the article). The company is now looking for a way out before the planned end of the contract in 2015.

Therry Breton, its CEO has declared that : "In its current form, the system does not work neither for the beneficiaries, nor for the DWP nor for ATOS Healthcare"."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "After 10 months of development, the Linux container management tool LXC has released its "production ready" 1.0 version. LXC is a set of userspace tools and libraries using the kernel namespaces and other security features to run a full Linux system in a "container".

It is similar to OpenVZ, Linux-Vserver,... but doesn't require any kernel patches, instead using only features that have been merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

Highlights for this major release include a stable API with bindings for Go, Lua, Python3 and Ruby, support for entirely unprivileged containers (using the fairly new user namespaces), support for a handful of backingstores, a reworked set of tools and improved documentation."Link to Original Source

Hey its AMAZING to see so many people in the tech press that know exactly how to run microsoft. I thought that CEO of this kind of giant company were pretty difficult to find. Its a relief to see that there are plenty of candidate for the position...

Seriously, in a perfect world, I would force such people to open a successfull bakery before being granted the right to send 'advises' to entrepreneurs or company bosses.

But of course, Google's people know better and have more money. And the list can go on. Dart as a replacement of javascript. Protocol buffer as replacement of ASN.1, SPDY to replace HTTP. With Jingle google tried to replace SIP protocol as well but at least the extended an existing standard but they dropped the support when stopping Google talk. For couse everyting is free, open source and Not Evil. So why bother?

Well as an aging network engineer, I am starting to be fed up with such "innovations". More consensus building would be refreshing.

judgecorp writes "The British Government has joined corporations such as Yahoo, Facebook and BT, in arguing against a tough proposed EU Regulation on Privacy. The UK government's intervention, led by justice minister Lord McNally, wants to scrap the proposed Regulation and replace it with a system of Directives. That's not just a matter of word play, it dilutes the proposals greatly. Regulations must be implemented in all EU member states at once, while the states have freedom on when and how to put a Directive into force."Link to Original Source

neutrino38 (1037806) writes "Xavier Niel, founder and CEO of the ISP Free Telecom, well known in France to be an agressive competitor of the big incumbent telcos like Orange, called a press event to explains a new mysterious intiative called "born2code".

It appeared to be the launch of a new computer programming school, based in Paris, codenamed "42" in reference to Douglas Adams books. The cursus is quite revolutonary in regards of the traditional French education system:

- the admission requires no prior background, only to pass the selection tests (and age limit from 18 to 30).- the selection tests are in two phases: first tests are online. It will preselect 4000 candidates. The second tests need the people to come and be involved in actual intensive programming tasks (15 hrs / day) during one month in a dedicated room called "the pool". Out of this will 1000 student be selected.- once admitted in the school, no tuition fee will be required nor any future contribution as a professional.- the school will not deliver any diploma. Mr Niel argues that companies are hiring on skill and experience basis rather than on diploma (note: french HR are badly addicted to Diplomas)

Mr Niel blasted the traditionnal education systems saying it produces "standard engineers" that are not innovative and that existing private schools are too expensive and prevent real talents to emerge by selecting student over money. It also reject traditionnal education in favor of a 2.0 education, peer to peer and project centered education that are in line with today's connected society

The goal of this school is to train 1000 "genius" every year. The proclamed purpose is to help IT companies to find suitable people for innovation, helping in this way the country competitivness.

Mr Niel will be funding the school on its own money during 10 years by putting 50 M euros on the table. Hehopes that other IT companies will take over as he is conviced that "only private initiative" can bring this kind of renewal.

Yuri Bril writes "The days of a fixed-width 960-pixel-wide web design are behind us. The markets for smart phones, tablet devices, and personal computers have created and environment where websites need to function on vastly different screen sizes and form factors. Desktop monitors can be over 2,000 pixels wide, while some phones are less than 400 pixels.

hypnosec (2231454) writes "Mozilla is testing a new patch for its Firefox browser that would provide more privacy to users and control over third party cookies by targeting the manner in which they are installed on users’ systems. Currently when users visit a website that site may be calling up a number of things from other websites – be it advertising, analytics, behavior tracking, etc. These third party elements drop cookies onto users’ machines, which may be accessed at a later date or time to gather data about users' usage habits. The new mechanism effectively prohibits websites from installing third party cookies onto users’ systems. Users who have the patch installed will have to directly interact with the website or the company "for a cookie to be installed on their machine." This means that up until a user actively interacts with the third party website directly, Firefox will not allow for those cookies to be installed on the user’s system."Link to Original Source

French telecommunication regulator is right to try to impose operator burdends on Skype.

1/ More and more people are adopting this service a primary phone service because of SkypeIn and SkypeOut feature. This means that there will be more and more case where user will need to make emergency calls. This lack of emergency call support is a shame. So the post above is... very shortsighted. One day you may need it yourseff.

2/ VOIP Technology / Skype are more and more displacing regular phones. They play the same role so they need somehow to be regulated in the same manner. There is in France a declarative licence for small telcos, the so called "L33-1". I know a couple of medium sized company operating VoIP service that applied to this without any problem. So it is not like it is unbearable for companies like Microsoft.

3/ I am so amazed by comment like: Skype should cut skype in/out, or avoid physical presence in France (replace by country xxx if you want) to avoid any form of regulation.

Damn ! these regulations are non discriminatory and made for the common good. Its like on the road, if you have no rules, you end up with a dysfunctional traffic. I see in all these comment some kind of selfish, short sighted spirit, 'I want the lowest cost regardless the consequences" that is a worrying trend.

Just because someone sees the work "governement", "regulation" they jump to the roof, say its bad, andy freedom and they try to avoid it without even pondering the consequences or the actual need for regulation. I see this ultimately as some kind of subtul selfishness.

As much as I agree that freedom and freedom to innovate should be preserved and fostered, it should not be a the cost of forgetting the notion of common good.

yeah an just an API so... imagine a socket API that does not allow you to connect to a server because the underlying protocols are not yet compatible. THAT would be useful.

Don't get me wrong: webrtc is a good thing (well would be better if they chose H.264 for interoperating with the rest of the world) but networking and protocols are now getting over 30 years old and its time that when an standard API is proposed, the interop work is done before so application developpers can really thrive doing their business. Not debugging details of DTS-TLS or STUN / ICE obscure stuff.

neutrino38 (1037806) writes "Google is being investigated in France for tax evasion. Most of the sales in this country are accounted in Google Irish subsidiary through a complex financial setup involving the Netherland and know as the "Dutch sandwitch".

The local IRS considers that most of this revenue is sold though Google employees located in France that issues invoices in French language. Therefore it seeks to requalify the amount of taxes paid by Google up to 169 M euros / years from the 5 M euros actually paid.

Accounting information was seized in Google French premises. Google lawyers tried to invalidate the procedure.. without sucesss.

Looks like France may get a big one time payment but future customer will have to call Irland and receive invoice in English to be served."Link to Original Source